I think Macworld’s Jason Snell did a great level-headed job responding to some pretty whacked-out questions in this Advertising Age interview with Simon Dumenco (who has all the misinformed media memes about Apple down pat).

Change Hidden iTunes Preferences is an application that will let you invoke some so-called “hidden” iTunes preferences: Show “Library” playlist, Show genre while browsing, Allow half-stars in ratings, Show arrow links — to either search the iTunes Store or search your library, Load complete iTunes Store preview before playing, Play songs while importing or converting, and Create file names with track number. Some of these preferences, as some users may recognize, used to be available in iTunes’ Preferences. Others, like the “Library” and half-stars prefs, have recently been discovered. This is for use with iTunes 8 or better only.

The download disk image contains the actual application (which is not an AppleScript) and an AppleScript to launch the app from your iTunes Script menu. Make sure you copy both of them off the .dmg.

Daypart is a simple yet full-featured application that allows you to schedule iTunes playlists when to play, giving you an easy way to program varied musical content throughout the week in your home or workplace.

Program your iTunes music when you want, the way you want.

Smart Playlists, Playlist Folders, and Genius Playlists provide some degree of musical variety in iTunes, but you still have to manually select, start, and stop each playlist one at a time whenever you want to switch from one to another. Daypart does all that for you and lets you program every day of the week with different playlists at different times. You can have Daypart play your Party Shuffle playlist in the morning, Most Recently Added around lunch, dance music in the afternoon, Classical for dinner, and audiobooks in the evening. And on the following day schedule something completely different. Plus, you can create more than one schedule to accommodate your many listening habits.

I’m seeing Apple’s announcement about offering DRM-free tracks around the internets and I’m also seeing headlines and memes like “Apple is dropping DRM”. Technically, it’s the record labels who have dropped their insistence that Apple provide DRM. Apple has stated they would provide DRM-free files in a heartbeat whenever the record labels wanted to get over themselves.

My good friend Kirk McElhearn has an article up at Macworld on syncing multiple iPods to one Mac:

When you’re alone with your iPod and your Mac, it’s easy to manage your library and sync your music, videos, audiobooks and data. But with the holidays over, many family members who didn’t have iPods beforehand may now find themselves the proud owners of one of Apple’s music players. And when two or more people share a Mac, it gets a bit confusing. There are several ways you can sync multiple iPods to one Mac, but the easiest method is to share a music folder. Here’s how you can share your music with another user on your Mac.

After playing around with the “show-library-playlist” setting, it looks like you do have to set “hide-library-playlist” also. So, to show the “Library”, run these two commands in Terminal one after the other (that is, press Return after entering each):

I’m not certain if this has been mentioned anywhere–I haven’t seen it–but I found the defaults command for displaying the entire iTunes library. Remember when you actually had a large playlist named “Library”, before Apple split it up into–what I call–”Master” libraries of “Music”, “Movies”, “Podcasts”, and so on? The “Library” listed everything in your iTunes library. Well, you can get that back using this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-library-playlist -bool TRUE

Quit iTunes before entering the command. When you restart you’ll have a new playlist named “Library” at the top of your Source list, above “Music”.

If you want to remove the “Library” again, use this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-library-playlist -bool FALSE

There is a second preference called “hide-library-playlist”, which I at first thought would have to be set in tandem with the opposite of “show-library-playlist”, but this doesn’t seem necessary. In fact, you can set one or the other, apparently, and get the desired result; that is setting “show-library-playlist” to TRUE or setting “hide-library-playlist” to FALSE amounts to the same thing. Also, for AppleScript purposes, this playlist can be referenced as library playlist 1; it always could be, but now it is visible.